100 Million Facebook Users Details on BitTorrent

A research has been able to collate over 100 million Facebook users details using crawler software and has published the account details on BitTorrent.

All the information is publicly-available and includes details of the Facebook users: names, unique IDs and URLs for the the profiles of every user who hasn’t checked the box saying “Don’t allow search engines to find me”. Also any friends that might not have checked the box will also allow access to your details and you are automatically opted in to the global search.

Facebook has responded, by saying: ‘In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook…this is the information available to enable people to find each other, which is the reason people join Facebook.’

If you haven’t already set your privacy settings within Facecbook it wont help much now anyway as all your details are now in an easy to digest file available for anyone to download.

Bowes says he did the research to show people just how much information Facebook was making publicly available and users should be more carefully to what they are agreeing to show in their Facebook accounts